So what inspired most people on here to continue on Building with Lego once they went by the age sticker on the box?

I have been reminiscing and it was around 2002/03 and I was 14/15ish when I came across this page http://carneycastle.com/index.htm and Bloodstone Castle by Daniel Siskind (which I can't find any pictures of anymore) and from there I realised I will never be free of my urge to buy and to build with Lego.

Bob Carney though... the sheer amount of massive, epic and Huge Castles he built set off inside me the desire to become and AFOL...

For me it was the old Lugnet Cool LEGO Site of the Week at some point in the late 90's. Not sure how I ran across it in the first place. It may well have somehow come through Mirsky's Worst of the Web that I read daily (not that CLSotW was featured, just that there was probably a link that led to a link that led to a link). I don't know what site I hit on first, but I do remember a working fig-scale roller coaster being one of the early models that I was really impressed by. Around the same time I got this promo set:It was just a buck with a tank of gas, so I figured what the heck. Sitting at my desk at work playing with this, it brought back fond memories from my youth. With my next few tanks of gas, I quickly got most of the other promo sets in that series, including three Fright Knights promos. The next time I went to my parents', I dug around in the basement and found my box of LEGO (mostly classic space, circa 1978-1982), that somehow my nephews had not found. I had also recently found e-bay, and started acquiring more bricks and figs - focusing largely on Forestmen and Ninjas, two themes that had occurred during my Dark Age. Anyway, the rest, as they say, is history. I'm going to guess that I started building in earnest during 2001, because I announced my first website on Lugnet in December of that year. The story comes full circle when in November 24-30, 2002, my site was Cool LEGO Site of the Week.

The first was after I came home from college. I was going through all my stuff in my parents attic when my childhood best friend came over to visit. We poked around through my old stuff and he noticed my old box of LEGO sitting on the dining room table. He asked if I remembered all the fun we had created with that box. We both started grinning and dumped it out on the table. After digging through it for a few minutes, we decided to build something using every piece. It took all day and well into the night but we finally finished what we thought was a truly epic moon base/space station. My friend left the next day and I was tearing our station apart when this life-changing thought went through my head...."I wonder if you can buy LEGO on Ebay?".

The second event was soon after I discovered that the answer to that question was "YES!". I had won a few LEGO auctions but it hadn't really caught hold of me yet. Then a package from Germany arrived...my latest Ebay purchase. Inside was a business card advertising something the seller called his "Brickbay Store"...as Bricklink was called back in those days. I went there and a whole new world was opened. That lead me, almost immediately to LUGNET, self-proclaimed friendliest place on the Internet. I never looked back.

I just never lost interest in Lego. I've played with them pretty consistently since I was five or so. I stumbled onto lugnet (geez, I hadn't realized it was that long) 13 years ago. Castleworld and the people involved in that, really got me interested in the online lego community. At the risk of slighting someone by forgetting them: some of the earliest people I remember are Chris Maddison, Shiri Dori, Mark Nelson (are they still active). Sava the Aggie and Bruce NH are other people who I remember from that era that probably kept my interest in Lego. All the people who keep the various forums and sites (fbtb, eurobricks, TBB, etc.) up and running also keep my interest.

richardanthonyc wrote:So what inspired most people on here to continue on Building with Lego once they went by the age sticker on the box?

I couldn't read or count

I tapered late teens but had built till then because I loved castles and Lego. Got back into it because I could and there was older sets that I always wanted. Then kept buying (still have four to go) to start building more details stuff.

Another thing I found amazing was the sheer amounts of people who were AFOLs and the scope of their activity. For some reason it never occurred to me that other people would collect and build "more advanced" Lego designs etc

Well, thankfully my dark ages were short (2007-2009) and they occurred early on (considering I'm just a TFOL, am I allowed to post in this thread? ) But I remember in January 2009 I was messing around with some LEGO my brothers had on the coffee table. I remembered how only a few years earlier, I was all about LEGO (it was, and is, my favorite toy & hobby). Over the course of the next few days, I acquired all my tupperware boxes of LEGO and the like, assimilating them into my room. I was able to find MOCpages and began to gander at all the great models and MOCs on display over there. I was building "future military" or some odd combination of themes, and that continued until April 2010 when I fell in love with Castle. Or rather, fell in love again with Castle (despite the awful sets in my childhood, like KK2, I was a big fan of medieval themes).

As a child my lego had mainly been space (Blacktron FTW) or City/Town (hand me downs I think since some sets are older than I am). But would always enjoy looking through the (same) lego catalogue at the forestmen and castle stuff (as a side note, catalogues have gone really down hill, where's all the epic scenes??!!).

Grew into technic then out of lego. Until, during a particularly stressful job period as an adult, a friend brought his old lego from his folks house. A trip to toys'r'us followed and I discovered the (then) current Fantasy Era Castle lego and bought the Dwarves Mine Defender (giant beards, little legs and trolls! What's not to love ). As the job stress continued, so did the lego purchasing and building as a 'de-stress' (Dwarves Mine, Tower Raid) and then delved into ebay purchasing to buy all that castle stuff I had desired as a kid.

We got my daughter a 33 piece DUPLO set when she was 18 months old. I remember it well -- on a trip to the beach. It wasn't long before I realized I couldn't build much with 33 pieces of DUPLO. So I very quickly made my first ever ebay purchases, and started getting great hulking boxes of DUPLO delivered to our house. (That's when I first got my LEGO budget -- I might be the only person ever to have to budget my DUPLO expenses.) Eventually I looked around the internet for info on DUPLO creations. There wasn't much, but in the process I found TBB and Bricklink and flickr (where I conveniently had an account for my wedding photos). Once I pulled out my small LEGO pieces to show my daughter, I had seen lots of fantastic stuff on the internet, and wanted to give it a go, too. I remember seeing some thing with spiraling pieces, and really wanted to try that too.

I think having kids brings lots of adults back to the hobby. At least my husband keeps showing me Facebook photos of his old college friends who are suddenly all enamored with LEGO again because their kids are into it. I doubt my husband's friends are aware of the online community, and they might not care, but I know they're out there....

I had very little LEGO as a kid due to the expense--the main one I remember is an old Technic set* I got when I was about 11 or 12. I always jumped at the chance to play with them at other kids' houses, though. I never really lost interest as I became an adult, but I was more interested in other things for a long time. And the expense was still a consideration.

Ironically, the thing that catapulted me back into the hobby was a licensed theme--the Avatar: the Last Airbender sets (all two of them). It was the best cartoon I had ever seen, and I picked up all kinds of tie-in toys, including the LEGO. All of a sudden I was in building heaven again. I started collecting Castle sets soon after that--Fantasy Era was just getting off the ground, and I found the color coding of the Crownies and Skellies to be really interesting and absorbing. Things sort of snowballed from there--grab bags off eBay, the wonders of Bricklink, fun new themes every year--and now my collection is frankly a little embarrassing, it's so big. I'm supposed to be a grown-up, right?

It's still expensive, of course, but I'm at a point in life where I can comfortably budget for it.

I'm only sixteen to this day, so I guess it's a bit early, but I'll post my story anyway; I never completely lost interest in Lego, which centered itself heavily on medieval themes too long ago for me to recall anymore. However, I was feeling the rise of a what we call a dark age exactly four years ago, building less and less, when I suddenly stumbled upon CC. I was probably just bored and looking for old sets online or something. After a few days of running through the front page and articles admiring all the great works there, I pressed that fateful 'Forums' button. And, well, that's when I realized I wasn't the only or one of a few Lego enthusiasts at or above my age (a thought I had considered a lot up until then), and the very sight of the community spurred me on to keep building.

Christmas 2010 my girlfriend got me the Kingdoms "Prison Carriage Rescue" just as a little gag gift because she knew I had loved LEGO as a kid and she had as well. Shortly after receiving that I began browsing pictures online of Lego MOC particularly castle and stumbles upon CC! And well I must say my dark ages are officially over. At this point all of my friends and family know I'm back into the hobby and receive LEGO as gifts for everything from birthdays to best man gifts lol.

As a kid, we mainly collected the space (M-tron, Blacktron, Ice Planet, and Spyrus) and castle (Black Knights, Dragon Masters) themes. We didn't have a lot of money, but usually could count on a set or two around birthdays or Christmas.

I quit building once I moved away to college, and while I didn't even really build all that regularly while in high school, I did dabble a bit here and there with the occasional spaceship or castle. Even while in college, when I'd come home for Christmas, I'd usually spend a day or two in the basement building the biggest, multicolored castle my sibling's collection could support.

The light really came on when my mom sent me an article about a guy who was building a scale replica of the Ohio State football stadium. In the article, he mentioned some crazy site called "Bricklink", which sparked my curiosity. A few clicks later, and I was amazed at what people were building in the online community, and what an amazing resource this new (to me, anyway) website Bricklink was going to be. Once I found Classic-castle, I was all-in, hook, line and sinker. I never dreamed as a kid that people actually built "color-coded" castles and concepts such as SNOT were an added point of interest.

My main AFOL/TFOL influences these days are people like Mark of Falworth, Fraslund, DC, Siercon & Coral, Ecclesiastes, Blake Baer, Eklund, and many others. There really are too many talented builders out there to name them all. One thing that I'm really proud of is the LCC program that we've started over in the Stories forum. We are up around 125 members, officially, though probably more like 50 who are really active, but it's still a blossoming project and it has been really cool to be a part of the development of it. Hopefully it will be something that holds the interest of a lot of KFOL/TFOL/AFOLs, and keeps them interested in the hobby. Maybe someday they'll look back and point to it as one of their major building influences, which I think would be a really cool thing.

Anyway, I'm glad to be back, and I'm now regularly bombarded by links to cool Lego stuff that my friends see, because they know that I'm the "Lego guy" and that I'll find them interesting. It's kind of funny to have a tag like that, especially when I visit home and the first thing people ask is, "so, how's the Lego thing going?"